‘@Play‘ is a frequently-appearing column which discusses the history, present, and future of the roguelike dungeon exploring genre.

The opening to NAQBU, a free web game, certainly makes all the right references. Its name first shows up as MORIA, and its similarities to Robert Alan Koeneke’s early roguelike are obvious. If you sit at its title screen, it also shouts out to the makers of Rogue, Hack, Larn, NetHack, Omega, Angband and ADOM. I feel like this game was made for me directly: I’ve played all of them.

I promised creator Luke Steuber that I’d write an essay with my opinions on Naqbu, and I’m not one to write something big without getting as much mileage out of it as I can, so here they are:

Your job is to descend into The Dungeon and beat the boss monster down there, as @-signs have done since time immemorial, which for the purposes of roguelikes is 1980. I would tell you what it’s called, but a lot of the monsters and items have non-English names that don’t fit easily into my memory. I don’t think they’re procedurally generated, some objects and monsters have names taken, or else derived from, from Mesopotamian mythology, and don’t seem to change from game to game.

Naqbu right now is a very young game, so any of this could change, but right now it plays like a very simplified Moria, with only ten levels and without its vaguely Tolkienesque theming. Like Moria, above the dungeon is a small town with various amenities, and also like Moria each level of the dungeon is regenerated when you enter it. A couple of its enemies even make cameo appearances, like the white worms of the early levels.

While Naqbu (mostly) uses ASCII characters for its graphics, it isn’t a terminal game. It uses a terminal-like appearance as an aesthetic choice, which is also an approach used by some versions of Dwarf Fortress and Caves of Qud. Naqbu then applies a layer of extra glitz on top of that, which reminded me a lot of the terminal emulator cool-retro-term. Magic items produce character-based animations around you when used, and some dungeon levels have display gimmicks. This is sometimes a little distracting; an effect I encountered later in the game offset the player symbol a few pixels to the right, and so made it a bit difficult to figure out just where they were standing. A few monsters have screen-warping effects around them that also make it hard to target them with attacks sometimes. (A few of the screenshots included here are a bit distorted because of them.)

Moria-likes vs Hack-likes

Being a Moria-like, Naqbu is a tactical game about fighting monsters. In Moria-likes, such as UMoria and Angband, even though they have some item identification such as in Rogue, the creatures that live in the dungeon are the chief obstacle of the game. The alternative are Hack-likes, where it’s more like the dungeon itself is your true enemy, and the monsters that live in it, while a big part of the challenge, are just one aspect of it. Naqbu doesn’t even have traps in its current form, and only a few kinds of bad item.

Naqbu has a lot of little comfort features. When you find a piece of equipment in the dungeon that’s better than what you’re currently using, the game will equip it to you automatically. That’s possible because none of the weapons or armor have any special functions at the moment, and there are no cursed items. There’s not much question whether one item is better than another, since it mostly comes down to numbers. Equipment power thus is largely the result of how much exploring you’ve done, and how deep. You can find scrolls of enchant weapon and enchant armor, and there is some minor strategy around whether you use them immediately or to wait until you’ve found a really good item, but with the game’s current difficulty I didn’t have any problems winning it on my first try even using them as soon as I found them.

Naqbu uses a Moria-like item identification system, which seems kind of like it plays lip service to Rogue’s challenging identification. There are a small number of bad items that give the ID system some teeth, there’s only three kinds of bad potions and just one bad scroll. All of the bad potions can’t be sold in the town shops, a pretty obvious tell that they’re useless. None of the bad items inflict any permanent harm on you either, so it’s a matter of saving potions until you have three with prices of 0, using one of each of them on the town level to identify them, then you’ll never be fooled by them again for the rest of the game. There aren’t a lot of different kinds of magic items anyway, making it a simple matter to learn what they all are, despite the complete lack of identify scrolls in the game.

The Dice Are In Charge

There’s a phenomenon in roguelikes where, after a certain point, it’s like the random number generator plays your character, where it determines your character’s strength more than your playing strategy does. All the best equipment is found in the dungeon, and how much you can boost them depends on how many enchant scrolls you find. For the most part it’s obvious how to make use of these items. There are no real decisions to be made there.

Rogue had some interesting risk/reward aspects with its items. There were monsters and traps that could decay your weapons and armor, but leather armor couldn’t be rusted, meaning every scroll of enchant armor that went into one was permanent, but otherwise it was the weakest armor.

You could wear a ring of maintain armor, but those were rare, and also increased your hunger rate slightly. You had a hard choice to make: did you hope to find strong banded mail or plate mail and put all of your enchant armor scrolls into them then try to preserve it, or did you pile them all into leather armor? What happens if you put on cursed armor then? Enchant armor scrolls will uncurse it, but you’ll then still have mostly-bad armor with a single plus added. Alternatively you could hope to find a scroll of remove curse, then switch to a suit that’s a better home for that plus.

Potions of raise strength drunk when at maximum strength raised that maximum, but rattlesnakes could drain strength and you might not ever find a potion of restore strength to get you back up to maximum. And all of these items had to be identified to know when to best use them. If it’s easy to identify items, then it becomes a lot more obvious what the optimum moves are. That’s what I mean by the random number generator playing the character: if you find an improvement item, you just use it right away, because there’s no reason not to. Hard item choices make the challenging combat more interesting by giving a player a way to blunt the monsters’ claws and teeth, but it’s not something that’s a real part of Naqbu.

It’s true that identification helps you know what to keep and what to drop, but there isn’t much drawback in using the bad items anyway. They certainly won’t harm your player’s long-term state, like Hack’s scroll of destroy armor or potion of sickness can. In practice, you use all the potion and scroll types once, and from then on you just never pick up the bad ones. In my run of Naqbu, I knew all the bad items by dungeon level two, so there was no strategy to it at all.

All of this is usually true of Moria-style games anyway. Because the dungeon levels can be regenerated endlessly, there is no real limit to the number of state-improving items that can be generated. This means that, at some point, the design expects the player to have spent time improving their state up to maximum or close to it. This is a reason why I tend to prefer Hack-likes, which generally don’t let players generate endless items, and tend to become broken when they do, as with Nethack’s exploit (now fixed I think) of farming black puddings. I’m not sure what can be done to reconcile this, but maybe Naqbu’s creator Jason Steuber can think of something? Or maybe he doesn’t see it as an issue that needs to be solved, I’d say that’s valid, but more on that further down.

Metagame Elements

Maybe Naqbu’s most interesting features come from its inheritance system. As you play and build up gold, you can improve your house to store more items, and expand your pack to carry more. Your house persists between lives: later characters will be able to take advantage both of stored items and its increased size. There’s also a bank where you can save money between lives, and even pays you interest for money saved, a notably Larn-like feature. A new character also inherits a percentage of earned experience points from

Now I should note that I won my first game of Naqbu, so I can’t say if any of these features work. I’m taking the game’s word for it, and making some assumptions about them too. As it stands now the game is too easy for these features to matter for that much. Now, it’s a good thing that you don’t have to use them to win, it’s possible to go too far in that direction, which is a problem I had with Rogue Legacy.

Building a Better Dungeon

Right now Naqbu is unbalanced in the player’s favor. It’s really too easy. It’s possible to die, yes, but with proper care and timely item use the game is very winnable. Please don’t take me as some kind of final authority in roguelike design, but I have played a lot of them. I think what Naqbu could use is a general tuneup, a lot of different game systems tightened up a bit.

Naqbu has scrolls of recall, which teleport you back to town after a delay of around 20 turns, and for 3,000 gold you can build an obelisk at your house that will teleport you down to the deepest level you’ve been to. That eliminates a lot of traipsing through the same dungeon levels, which is important when the monsters on the early levels are no longer a significant challenge. But nothing prevents you from doing it anyway if you need to restore your stocks of items. The dungeon levels are rebuilt every time you reenter one, complete with a new stock of items to find, so it’s an endless source of supplies. There are shops on the town level, but it’s unlikely that you’ll need them much beyond the first couple of levels.

Items don’t have weight themselves, it seems: you can carry multiple suits of armor to sell in town without issue. Naqbu has Moria-style inventory limits. That means items of the same type automatically get pulled together into stacks, and carry limits are by slot, so you can have as many potions of a type in a stack as you can scrounge up. By around dungeon level 8 I had a stack of like 40 cure light wounds potions, and a not-insignificant number of stronger types. I also had a big stack of short-range teleport scrolls for getting out of scrums, and a few potions of speed, an underrated resource in many games, to tip combat odds in my favor. There are some nicely challenging monsters in the deeper dungeons, but by the time you reach them you have so many help items from exploring the earlier levels that you’re never in much danger.

If I were to try to improve Naqbu, I would tighten up each of its game systems a little bit. Maybe limit item stacking a bit. Implement a better state improvement system, where the choices aren’t all obvious. Add traps. Lessen the item generation so the player has an incentive to use the shops on the town level. Add some more kinds of items, so the player will have to choose between what to carry, and to make identification harder. Make equipment power more from intrinsic properties than just increasing their numeric power. Give more early-game monsters interesting properties besides just hitting you.

Maybe some of these problems I identify are from my own dissatisfaction with Moria-style design, but Moria makes up for it by having a lot of really mean monsters too. I think there’s room for Naqbu to make an identity for itself, not by making the monsters harder, but by making itself a bit more Hack-like and getting its challenge there, making it harder to build the player’s state.

It’s possible that’s my own biases speaking. There are lots of people who prefer Moria-style play, but if Naqbu wants to remain on that route, I think the monsters will have to get harder to make up for it. Naqbu currently limits player experience level to 25, which I reached by dungeon level 9. When you can’t grow the player character through experience any longer, there is a lot less incentive to explore the dungeon, and the focus on the game moves almost entirely to gaining more items, and if you have enough items to win by that point there’s really nothing else left to do. There is no more improvement in state left to gain.

Naqbu maintains a universal score list. At the moment there are only fifteen players on it, and five of them are winners. This proves pretty handily that the game isn’t very difficult. My own game is currently 4th place on the list as I write this.

I feel like there’s more I could say, but it’s almost 5 AM as I write this, and it’s already really lengthy. I threw it together quickly and obsessively. I wanted to get something out there, not just to contribute my opinions to the author while the design is still malleable, but also to get the news about the game out quickly. I think it’s a shame that there’s only been 15 players of Naqbu so far. I think all of its problems are due to the fact that the game’s only a couple of days or so old as of this writing, and that it has lots of potential. I have so many things to keep a watch for that I find it hard to make promises, but I’ll try to set aside a little sliver of my overtaxed brain to check on Naqbu’s progress in the coming weeks.

Naqbu (by Luke Steuber, web, $0, no AI use)

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As I mentioned earlier, the creator of Moria, Robert Koeneke, died recently, but thankfully before he went he did interviews about his experiences, notably in David Craddock’s Dungeon Hacks.

Roguelike Celebration 2022: Celebrating Moria (Youtube, 25 minutes)

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Roguelike Celebration 2022, the yearly conference about this peculiar genre, begins tomorrow! This year it is again being held virtually. Its schedule is here, and you can get your ticket here. As I write this tickets cost $30, but if you can’t afford that there is an option for free admission at that link. If you can pay though then please consider it? I presented there last year, although in my 30 minute timeslot I didn’t even get to cover like even 10% of what I had planned.

It generally has much of interest both to players and developers, and covers more than strictly-defined roguelikes but also a variety of games and topics related to procedural content generation.Here’s a selection of talks that I personally think may be interesting, although there are many more than this planned:

• Persistence and Resistence: How narrative in roguelikes is currently underutilized, by Sherveen Uduwana
• Remembering Moria – a roguelike before the roguelikes, by Santiago Zapata
• How hard can it be to create a non-violent rogue-lite dungeon crawler?, by Tabea Iseli
• Smoothing the Sharp Edges of RNG, by Evan Debenham
• A Million Little Players: Monte Carlo Simulations for Game Design, by Phenry Ewing
• Tips and Tricks in Procedural Generation, by Pierre Vigier

I hope to see you (virtually) there!

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An Angle on Angband

If you’ve played a Hack-like, Angband (home page) will probably look fairly similar at first. It, too, is a grid-based dungeon exploration game where you fight lots of monsters and find objects with unknown properties that you must discover as you play. Both games have randomized maps, dangerous monsters with fearsome abilities, powerful magic items to use against them, spells you can learn and cast, and traps you must look out for. Both standard-bearer for the Hack series, NetHack, and Angband now feature graphical tiles by default, although they can also be played in the old ASCII-based format.

Where the games differ is in their general philosophy of what dungeon exploration means. While NetHack has lots of strong monsters, it seems to take the view that the dungeon itself is your greatest opponent. The puzzle of figuring out item identities is a larger part of the game, and NetHack offers both more uncertainty in identification and more ways to identify. NetHack has more set locations that offer specific puzzles players must overcome, like finding the Luckstone at the bottom of the Gnomish Mines, or getting past Medusa, or crossing the moat around the Castle; Angband has only one set location, its Town, although there are lots of special areas that can be randomly found within its dungeon levels.

NetHack’s dungeon cannot be exited without giving up the game, for even once you get the Amulet and escape, you’re thrown into an End Game that functions as a coda to your adventure; in Angband, you’ll probably leave the dungeon many times in order to avail yourself of the Town’s useful services. In Angband, this Town offers shops where you can buy and identify items, but the shops are all menus. NetHack’s shops have a physicality, in that they’re rooms in the dungeons, overseen by a Shopkeeper character, which allows players to steal from shops if they can survive the shopkeeper’s eyes and wrath. And, of course, NetHack has its iconic pets that can help you explore the dungeon and provide other services, while in Angband you fight alone.

NetHack’s has a stronger sense of place than Angband, where dungeon levels are much larger but also less distinctive, and anyway are forgotten once you leave a level. If you go downstairs then right back upstairs in Angband, you’ll find a completely different map waiting for you, with new monsters and items. NetHack’s dungeons persist so long as your character survives, and you can go back to a level after a long time and find it’s largely as you left it.

It’s possible to see a kind of rivalry between NetHack and Angband, but I think this is largely an illusion. Both games know what they’re about and are content to pursue it in their own way.

While NetHack has more name recognition, lots of people like Angband! It’s spawned several popular variants all its own. One of them, ZAngband, is basically its own game by now, with a ton of variants and other notable branch-offs.

The Legacy of Moria

While Beneath Apple Manor has many aspects of a roguelike, Rogue is still at the center of the roguelike genre. Rogue inspired Hack, and then, NetHack.

But also, Rogue inspired Moria, and in fact Moria predates Hack by several years. Moria may be the first “roguelike” game, in that it’s not Rogue itself but was clearly inspired by and derived from Rogue. Even the “direct” descendants of Rogue, like URogue and SuperRogue, came along after Moria. If there is another character-based game played on university computing terminals between Rogue’s release and Moria’s, word of it has not come down to me.

Moria was created by (the recently deceased) Richard Koeneke. First written in a dialect of BASIC, then converted to one of Pascal, he left university and, like many other roguelike authors who exited academia, appears never to have worked on their game again. But he opened the game’s source, and some other people ported it to C, and called the new version UMoria. UMoria still exists, and can be downloaded to play locally or via a web browser.

The significance of Moria and UMoria on the history of computer gaming cannot be overstated. Rogue was popular yes, and has inspired a legion of games taking one or more of its aspects and running with them. But there is something fundamental to the core of Moria that has seeped even more deeply into CRPGs. Diablo’s credits mention UMoria as a direct inspiration, but more than that, the basic sense of Moria has become pervasive.

It is easy to forget now that there used to be all freaking kinds of RPGs, and early on games in the genre looked very different from how they look today. dnd and Oublette on PLATO systems have a slightly familiar kind of overhead view, with the walls of the dungeon around you drawn in lines, but monsters don’t exist outside of your immediate interactions with them. Wizardry, what is now weirdly called a “blobber,” has a grid-based world that is experienced in first-person, and this became a very common means of presentation, inspiring… well, all of these are purely from memory: The Bard’s Tale series, the Might & Magic series, Dragon Wars, Dungeon Magic, Eye of the Beholder, Dungeon Hack, Swords & Serpents on the NES, the dungeons of Phantasty Star on the SMS, Arcana over on the SNES, a funky 3D version of the original Bomberman on MSX, and countless other games that presented the mazes without the monsters. Even Strong Bad has wrestled against one of the blobber ilk with his begloved hands. (“Who’s Strong Bad,” asks half of my audience. I know, I’m old.)

In particular, it should be remembered that Dungeons & Dragons, which inspired this whole category, was not a solo game. Despite promises of solitaire play in the 1st Edition AD&D DM’s Guide, you really needed at least two people, a player and a referee, or “DM,” to play; most groups had multiple players, each playing one or more characters. This is still how D&D is most commonly played today. Rogue was one of the games that, by attempting to offer a solo version of the experience, put the emphasis on the solo.

But Rogue has other things going on in it. Its identification game is a work of genius by itself, and the way its systems work together make it special in ways other than just being a D&D simulation. Its descendant Moria, on the other hand, offers a more generalized RPG framework, and that is what has come to suffuse and infect nearly the entire rest of video gaming. What Moria did was generalize the solo fantasy RPG experience. Moria has multiple attack types, like fire, cold, and electricity, and resistances to them, has equipment items with add-on special properties, and has a bunch of generally plain monsters but with colors that identify their properties like they were palette-swapped.

In fact, I do not think I am being hyperbolic when I say that, due to Moria’s influence on Diablo, nearly every game now that features what they call a “loot system,” is actually offering a Moria-style loot system. It is that pervasive. And Angband, as UMoria’s direct descendant, has kept up that system and elaborated upon it for over 30 years now.

J.R.R. Tokens

Angband started out as mostly a themed version of UMoria. If the name Moria sounds familiar, like you might have heard it in a movie once, that’s because it comes right out of Tolkien. The Mines of Moria* are the dungeons of the game, and that’s why at level 50 the player fights a Balrog, trying to do a better job of it than Gandalf did.

* Off the subject. A fun game to play if you’re of a frame of mind is, when watching the relevant scenes in the movie of The Fellowship of the Ring, to refer to random things as “the Something… of Moria!” You can start from outside with “The Gates of Moria!” Say it like Gimli, with a gruff voice, and it helps if you can rouse yourself to try a Scottish accent. It’s more entertaining if it’s a bad one. Then: The Halls… of Moria! The Goblins… of Moria! The Hasty Retreat… of Moria! The Panicked Screaming… of Moria! I find that one can amuse themselves for quite some time this way.

Well you might have heard that there are other Middle Earth books than The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. One of these, cobbled together by John Ronald Reuel’s son Christopher Tolkien, is The Silmarillion. It’s a big collection of backstories and myths and legends of questionable canonicity.

You might remember that the Mines of Moria were not the final destination of the LotR books, but merely a stop along the way. If you read The Silmarillion, you’ll know that there were once even worse places in Middle Earth than that. One of them was a stronghold of Morgoth, called the pits of Angband.

That’s why you fight Morgoth in the game of Angband, on level 100, and his lieutenant Sauron, the same entity that was the big baddie in The Lord of the Rings, on Level 99. And what’s more, all of Angband is deeply drenched in token Tolkienness. It’s got a bunch of Tolkien monsters, both unique types, from the afore-mentioned end bosses down to Farmer Maggot and his dogs, to representatives of species like goblins, orcs, Ainur, and Maiar. A lot of the items have add-on properties like being a weapon “of Westernesse,” which in game terms means it’s quite good.

Despite how deeply it plumbs the pits, If you approach it as a full adventure in Middle Earth where you can visit the Shire, smoke a pipe with Frodo and hang out with Strider, Angband will disappoint you. It takes the wonder and beauty of The Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings series, and the Silmarillion, and uses them as basically a list of monsters and items. Some of the variants that I’ll get to later try to restore a bit of that, but for the most part Angband is a game of tactical combat, map exploration, and loot collection, and anything from the literature that doesn’t fit that purpose is left out. There’s no Land of Mordor, Where the Shadows Lie; no Gondor with its rich history, except where it involves special monsters and items; and no sad departure of the Elves to the West. (Writing about Tolkien involves capitalizing a lot of seemingly random terms.)

It’s not that Angband seeks to balderize Tolkien, but that it just has no place to use those aspects of his work. These are generic fantasy exploration and tactics games that have been given a coat of Tolkien Paint, probably by Tom Bombadil, who has had difficulty finding work lately.

What Angband gets from the Lord of the Rings and its subsidiary books is a rich lore that it can just do with as it pleases. It lends weight to the games. Instead of just making up a bunch of monsters, which often falls flat, it puts on an Elven Cloak and seems richer for it. It’s not just Angband itself; there’s a whole family of Angband variants that work by replacing (or sometimes, just supplementing) the Tolkien stuff with material from some other author, from Roger Zelazny to Anne McCaffery to H.P.Lovecraft to Terry Pratchett.

That makes a good enough introduction! Next time, in a week, we’ll offer some early playing advice, then maybe a timeline of Angband and its versions, and after that will come the Herculean task of looking at some of those many variants. See you soon-adillo!

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TotR identifies Moria as the first follow-up game to Rogue. My notes have it popping up three years after the original, which seems like an impossibly long time now for no one to have made a copy, but even Advanced Rogue, which was built off of Rogue code, didn’t see the world until 1984. Moria, by contrast was written from scratch. Moria’s Wikipedia page notes that Koeneke originally wrote it in a form of BASIC, but rewrote it in Pascal, and I think that’s probably the version that first saw distribution.

(A good place to look for the relative appearance times of roguelike games is this page on the Tangaria website. There is also BALROG, which no longer exists on the living web but is preserved on the Wayback Machine, although a link to it currently eludes me.)

Moria was converted to the C language to produce UMoria, which the credits to Blizzard’s Diablo cite as a direct inspiration. A prototype of Diablo was found some time back that was turn-based, and was even closer to the Moria play style. There’s also GMoria, another variant of UMoria.

A browser-playable version of Moria is reputed to reside here, but currently seems broken. Moria itself wasn’t ported beyond Pascal, but UMoria was written in C and so managed to proliferate. User polluks at GitHib has preserved and cleaned up the source to UMoria and released a version 5.7 that remains true to early versions, and runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. Previous versions ran on VMS, DOS and Amiga. Their account also maintains several other versions of Moria, including the Pascal source of the VMS version.

The object of Moria is to descend into the titular mines and defeat the Balrog that gave Gandalf so much trouble. Some of its many improvements over Rogue include a town level where players can purchase and sell items, more types of equipment including helmets and boots, the need to carry a light source in the dungeon, and levels that could be much larger than one screen in size.

Angband players will find most of this familiar; while it has a much longer dungeon, in structure its apple doesn’t fall far from Moria’s tree. Both Moria and Angband place the game emphasis more on fighting and tactics than Rogue.

Rogue was popular in the culture of university computing, but its source was closed, and what variants it got were built off of leaked code. Moria was the first open source roguelike, which allowed for its conversion to C. This C version was renamed to UMoria. UMoria is the ancestor of mighty Angband, which is one of the most-permuted games ever made, with well over 100 variants, with even more appearing once in a while.

I can’t resist turning this into a parable about the virtues of cooperation and sharing. Because of Rogue’s closed source, its immediate variants are very hard to find now, with only the versions preserved by the Roguelike Preservation Project surviving, and Rogue itself has largely been overshadowed by NetHack and its variants.

For more on UMoria, back in 2015 Roguelike Radio did an episode on it. There is also a good Moria resource page.

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